NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Debt Policy, Corporate Taxes, and Discount Rates

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Mark Grinblatt, Jun Liu

NBER Working Paper No. 9353
Issued in November 2002
NBER Program(s):   AP

This paper studies the valuation of assets with debt tax shields when debt policy is a general time-dependent function of the asset's unlevered cash flows, value, and history. In a continuous-time setting, it shows that the value of a project's debt tax shield satisfies a partial differential equation, which simplifies to an easily solved ordinary differential equation for most plausible debt policies. A large class of cases exhibits closed-form solutions for the value of a levered asset, the value of its tax shield, and the appropriate tax-adjusted cost of capital for discounting unlevered cash flows.

Published: Grinblatt, Mark & Liu, Jun, 2008. "Debt policy, corporate taxes, and discount rates," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 141(1), pages 225-254, July.

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